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Waking up is hard to do, but it’s easier with NPR’s Morning Edition. Hosts Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep bring the day’s stories and news to radio listeners on the go. Morning Edition provides news in context, airs thoughtful ideas and commentary, and reviews important new music, books, and events in the arts. All with voices and sounds that invite listeners to experience the stories. The range of coverage includes reports on the Supreme Court from Nina Totenberg; education from Claudio Sanchez; health coverage from Joanne Silberner; and the latest on national security from Tom Gjelten. Steve and Renee interview newsmakers: from politicians, to academics, to filmmakers. In-depth stories explore topics like “digital generations” about the effect of technology on the way we live; special series delve into the intersection of science and art, and find untold stories of the country’s Hidden Kitchens. Morning Edition, it’s a world of ideas tailored to fit into your busy life.

In state legislatures around the country, lawmakers are debating important subjects — education reform, election laws, gun control and abortion. But in Florida, one of the hottest issues to come before the Legislature this term involves cats.

There, lawmakers are considering a contentious bill that would offer legal protection to groups that trap, neuter and return feral cats to their colonies.

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Minnesota's Mall of America is home to some 500 stores, a theme park and now some 72,000 ladybugs. Third graders released them inside the shopping center this week. Ladybugs protect the mall's 30,000 plants by eating aphids. Some mall-goers worried the bugs might descend on the food court, but a spokesman says the mall has released the ladybugs for years, and there's been no ladybug takeover yet. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with news of a changing retail environment.

We've told you of a plan to let states collect sales tax from online retailers. Now we're on the way to an online bar. Vermont lawmakers are considering a bill to let brewers ship their beer directly to consumers. This proposal faces the concern that underage drinkers might order beer but wineries already do this. If the measure should pass, you could order a six-pack or maybe a keg by UPS.

Auto executives got a grilling on Capitol Hill yesterday. Not the usual suspects from Detroit's Big Three. Think much, much smaller. Executives from the hybrid carmaker Fisker testified about hundreds of millions of dollars in loans Fisker got from the government. Today, the company is on the verge of collapse.

Investigators still do not know exactly why there was a battery fire on a Japan Airlines Boeing 787 jet back in January. On the concluding day of a National Transportation Safety Board hearing, officials did conclude that the original tests of the battery were in adequate.

NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.

WENDY KAUFMAN, BYLINE: The worldwide fleet of Boeing 787s - that has been grounded for three months - will soon be returning to passenger service.

Air travelers are growing less and less happy. Automatic budget cuts are now leading to hundreds of flight delays, about half of all delayed flights this week.

NPR's Tamara Keith reports.

TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Up until this point, the effects of the sequester have been scattered and hard to pin down: hiring freezes, delayed park openings. But then the furloughs of air traffic controllers the Federal Aviation Administration had been threatening for months hit and, bam, the sequester got real, real fast.

This does not happen very often. This morning all five living presidents, past and present, are in the same place at the same time.

The occasion is the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

The design committee for this presidential library had a former librarian as its chairperson, former First Lady Laura Bush. She told our colleague David Greene she studied the libraries of presidents past.

The U.S. Senate may vote this week on the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would allow states to collect sales tax from more online retailers. And as the political and retail landscape has shifted from the last time around, the Senate is expected to approve the measure.

The proposal to require online sellers to collect out-of-state sales tax has been kicked around for many years. For a decade, Amazon was a fierce opponent.

When Superstorm Sandy inundated lower Manhattan last year, thousands of lab animals drowned and many scientists lost months or even years of work. One of those scientists is Gordon Fishell, a brain researcher at New York University.

Just hours before Sandy reached New York, Fishell says, he began to worry that animals housed in a basement below his lab were in danger. "I realized Hurricane Sandy and high tide were going to coincide at Battery Park, which is right where my lab is," he says.

I spoke yesterday with Dan Sichel, a Wellesley economist and a Lady Gaga fan. Both of these facts are relevant for this story.

The U.S. government is about to tweak the way it measures the economy, and some of the biggest changes will affect the entertainment industry.

Under the current system, Sichel told me, Lady Gaga's sales of concert tickets, online songs and CDs all count toward gross domestic product. But the value of the time she spends in the studio working on new songs isn't counted. That's about to change.

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. Some of the media made mistakes during coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. A sign of integrity is whether you correct them. A TV captioning service apologized for its mistake. Viewers in Dallas saw the bombing suspect misidentified. The screen read: "Marathon Bomber: He is 19-year-old Zooey Deschanel." For the record, the suspect is 19-year-old Chechen immigrant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and not the star of the TV series "New Girl." It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

It was a yeoman's task but they would never put it that way in Washington State. The state just completed a six-year effort to rewrite its laws using gender-neutral language. Terms like fisherman and freshman were replaced by fisher and first-year student. Penmanship became handwriting. More than 3,000 sections of the law were revised but some words did not change. Manhole and man lock are words that survived; they just couldn't find a better way of saying them.

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Here's another reminder that a fast-moving news story can completely change. Prosecutors have dropped the charges against Paul Kevin Curtis. He's the Elvis impersonator first arrested in the case of ricin being sent to U.S. officials, as we reported last week.

The massive swath of Boston that has been closed for more than a week is getting closer to reopening. City officials yesterday brought victims of the marathon bombings and their relatives in for a private visit and allowed neighborhood residents back home for the first time in over a week. Businesses also began the process of cleaning up and preparing to reopen.